Biomutant
Christian Haines, Managing Editor
Biomutant is a mess. It’s a brilliant Saturday morning cartoon mess of bright colors, anthropomorphic talking animals, and zany kung fu action, but it’s also like a teetering Jenga tower: a mess of complicated gameplay systems that don’t fit together very well and of quests piled on top of one another. The spirit of the game seems to be the more the merrier: more systems, more skills, more items, more mechanics, more characters, more quests, more world. At first glance, this resembles Ubisoft’s proclivity for multiplying things to do and places to go in their open-world games, but because Experiment 101 (the studio behind Biomutant) consists of only 20 or so developers, the game’s many elements often have a slapdash quality. Everything works, most of the time, but not everything works well. Some of it doesn’t make a lot of sense, at least not if the goal’s a smooth, accessible gameplay experience.
The best part of the game are the wonderful vistas opened up by exploration.
A lot of the reviews of Biomutant make this same point, drawing the conclusion that the game’s faults are the result of a small studio trying to ape AAA game design. The lesson seems to be that smaller studios shouldn’t bite off more than they can chew, or in game design terms, they shouldn’t overscope: they should only make as much game as they can get out the door in a polished form. In this light, Biomutant is an Ubisoft game done badly.
For all its faults, however, Biomutant doesn’t actually share the same spirit as a Ubisoft open-world game. Its rough edges are as much the result of a willingness to experiment, to create an original combination of narrative and gameplay elements, as they are the result of mimicking AAA open-world conventions. Yes, there’s a map filled with quest icons, loads of weapons and upgrades, outposts to conquer, and many of the other trappings of a Far Cry or an Assassin’s Creed, but there’s also a lot of wonderfully strange elements, even if their implementation is often lacking.
It’s a furry-eat-furry world, as (unsurprisingly) the post-apocalypse is filled with power struggles.
For example, I took over an outpost by releasing moths from an underground tunnel nearby. I also discovered a special suit allowing me to excavate the ruins of what was once a nuclear power plant. All of this happens with commentary from a narrator explaining the moral consequences of your choices. There are also regular flashbacks to the trials and tribulations of a younger version of yourself in the form of playable sequences (not cut scenes!); a character creation system integrating aesthetic and mechanical choices, so that the look of your furry protagonist signals its skills and attributes; and a bright, colorful world that combines the post-apocalyptic landscape of the Fallout series with the cartoon environmentalism of Captain Planet and the fantastic martial arts action of Avatar: The Last Airbender.
Biomutant goes for John Wick-style shooting, but the wonky targeting never lets it feel quite right.
(Image from Press Kit.)
Most of these elements are rough around the edges. Some of them are very rough. I can imagine a better version of the game, one in which the combat’s more visceral (there’s something off about the timing of the animations), the various systems are explained more clearly and with less text, and the moral of the story gets laid on a little less thick. At the same time, I don’t want a polished and pared down version of Biomutant. I want the bright, gangly mess — like some kind of irradiated creature that’s climbed out of a polluted river with new limbs and organs. I’m too early in the game to have a sense of how I might feel by the end of it, and I can certainly understand folks who plan to wait for a sale ($60 is a lot in this economy), but there’s something about the game’s patchwork quilt of kung fu action, environmental parable, and hiking simulator that has its hooks in me. Sometimes rough edges aren’t just the cost of experimentation but also the pleasure of it.
